Data storage has become increasingly important as information handling systems become capable of handling and communicating more data. Currently, improvements to data storage systems are aimed at increasing the amount of data and providing fault tolerant systems. While data storage systems have become more efficient at handling large amounts of data in a fault tolerant manner, typically such fault-tolerant data storage systems often are cost-prohibitive.
Expensive fault tolerant data storage systems therefore may not be implemented in certain situations where their cost is not justified by the design application. As a result, information handling systems often are configured with lower cost data storage systems. One example of this cost savings measure is in the implementation of serial advanced technology attachment (SATA) disk drives in place of fibre channel disk drives.
Current fibre channel disk drives are multi-ported and offer fault tolerant interfacing with external components. One of the drawbacks of including a fibre channel disk drive in a system is the drive's price difference. Presently fibre channel disk drives typically are between 3 to 6 times the price of a SATA disk drive, for a comparable storage capacity. Thus designers often may include a SATA drive instead of a fibre channel drive in certain applications.
While serial disk drive offer increased cost savings over fibre channel drives, the inherent single ported design are often a source of failure, thus, reducing the availability of data. It is this single point of failure which may cause designers either to include costly fibre channel disk drives or risk potential data loss.
Therefore, it would be desirable to provide a system and method for cost-effectively utilizing serial storage devices in a fault tolerant applications, thereby allowing for the utilization of more cost effective serial storage devices without the drawbacks inherent to a single ported system.